Do you tend to do more dry cooking or moist (wet) cooking?

TeRReT. Good to see you here :kissing_smiling_eyes:

There is often a pot of soup on the back burner and I cook a lot of pasta, so the scale is firmly tipped to the wet side. The ratio would probably be 3:2 moist to dry.

Interesting question and interesting answers.

SMH . . .suspending/banning popular posters just as they implement an unpopular/non-functional ā€œupgradeā€ certainly does not seem a recipe for success. Then again, who knows what vipGeorges deems a success? And Iā€™m sure he doesnā€™t know what a recipe is :wink:

LW . . . Iā€™ll bet HO would get a nice boost in readership/postings if you unretired from recapping the next season of Top Chef. Just sayinā€™

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Hiii! Glad to see you here!
The changeover at CH has obviously impacted traffic and content significantly :frowning:

Hopefully this winter wonā€™t be another neverendingwinter from hell- i had soups and stews for months on end!

Definitely changes seasonally for me. In the middle of summer i turn anything into a salad and will occasionally use the stove for a quick saute.
But in the winter its almost all soups and stews- usually iā€™ll make one or two large batches on the weekend and then freeze a few portions so i rotate what is next for variety after the first few weeks. Also a lot of roasting veggies happening.

Right now it has definitely cooled off and feels like fall yet iā€™m trying to delay soup making until the end of october or so. Last winter was just sooooo loooonnngggg!

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Why yes. Last winter was very long and you must have had a lot of stew?

1 ) Spring and summer : Dry
2 ) Fall and winter : Wet

Chem ,
Maybe one of your fantastic surveys for us ???

Dry. Lots of curries and stir fries. Year round. Iā€™m not sure why there would be a seasonal difference. I have air conditioning, thank heaven. I cook what I want, when I want.

When itā€™s 95 in the shade and 95% humidity, soups and stews are not appetizing to me, and the air conditioner is grateful to not have.to compensate for a hot oven.

Chacun Ɣ son gƓut

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I have heat (68) and air conditioning (72). Unfortunately, I cannot stay at home 24/7. Actually, fortunately I donā€™t stay home 24/7.

When itā€™s hot out I want salads, cold soups, melons. When itā€™s cold and wet/snowy, I like the aroma of stews or soups wafting through the house.

Berries in the spring and summer; melons in the fall/winter. Asparagus in the spring, tomatoes in the summer.

Food, for me, is seasonal.

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Yeah, my body, my appetite, my palate are not fooled by the cool temp indoors. A lot of things affect how we eat seasonally, including the number of daylight hours and if we care to, following the seasonality of produce, etc.

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The heat never seems to sway my food choices. I run the oven or make soups and stews in the dead of summer. We have A/C!

Iā€™m the same way. Thatā€™s not to say I wonā€™t eat grilled steak in the winter, but generally, I look forward to braises and stews when it gets colder outside.

Summer to me is lots of grilling, searing, pan-frying, broiling, sautƩing.

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In recent years Iā€™ve been doing more wet than dry generally. It was probably 70 wet to 30 dry over the last ten years but ever since Mr Rat started working evenings instead of nights itā€™s probably 95 wet to 5 dry. Anything I cook when I get home around 7 or 8 has to be something that will either cook many hours or at least be palatable reheated when he gets home around 1 AM. Lots of roasting, braising, soups, stews. We only do omelettes and such on the weekends. Heā€™s the wok man anyway, I leave that to him.

Yes, but even when I was much much younger and we DIDNā€™T have AC, my choice of foods was not predicated by the weather. I did not feel more like eating soup in the winter and less in the summer. I wanted soup whenever I wanted it, LOL!

I think its more of a cultural/acclimatization type of a thing. If you grew up with seasonally offered foods, thereā€™s a comfort aspect to eating those at the ā€œrightā€ time.

Letā€™s face it, none of us on these forums are faced with regularly coming in from the freezing cold outside wrapped in wholly inadequate rough homespun cloth ā€œcoatsā€ to an unheated interior with only a small woodburning fireplace, in need of something we can slurp up fast (and that incidentally makes the most of whatever meager ingredients havenā€™t rotted, molded, or already been eaten by vermin in the dead of winter) to help warm our interiors.

So thereā€™s a historical aspect to this preference for soup and its ilk in the winter (if youā€™re talking folks of EU descent at least, obviously if you hail from India-wards the conditions and the customs/expectations they spawn would be entirely different). Thereā€™s just not much reason for it to continue to exist in our modern world except that its what some folks have become used to it.

Also, a bit of cooking in your modern kitchen isnā€™t going to heat things up that much. Unless youā€™re AC is wholly inadequate, it wonā€™t even cause a blip. Or maybe if you have a super-cheap oven that vents right though the top of your stove so it acts like a giant space heater. I had one of those once in a rental - hated it passionately. Couldnā€™t bake worth spit unless you plugged the vent under the back burner, and it didnā€™t really bake all that much better even then. Anyway.

shrug

Regardless, I cook what I want to eat whenever I want to eat it. It seems to me the whole ā€œsoup is only good in winterā€ thing is on its way out. Itā€™s been at least 10 years since I have heard a waitress exclaim in horror, ā€œOh no, I know that soup is on the menu, but we only make it in the winter!ā€

And the LAST time I heard that from waitstaff was a good 15 or 20 years before that - so 25 or 30 years at least since its been common to see soup as a seasonal entry on a menu.

LOL!

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